Now that we've got our plan set and our pattern tranferred to our billet we'll head over to the bandsaw and cut away everything that doesn't look like a knife.

Now having our billet rough cut we'll head over to the grinder to tune up the profile with an 80 grit belt. You'll notice that I left a bit of steel on the bottom of the bolster area. The purpose of this is to get a perfect fit of the bolster and tang so I'll wait to clean up this hard to reach area until I've got the bolster material fit up and can grind both bolsters and the tang to shape all at once.

Now onto the bolsters. At this point I've cut the bolsters from a German Silver flatbar then squared them up with the spine of the knife and super glued them both in place. The super glue is a temporary bond at this point and is just enough to get the pinholes layed out, drilled, and reamed. A sharp swat with a hammer will knock the bolster right back off the blade once were done with this stage.

Moving on to handle pin layout we'll cut out the hand drawn pattern of our wire pattern and tape it to the handle so we can center punch all the pin holes that are going to go through the handle material. With silver wire it's very important to have a very solid plan for the pattern because the pin holes need to be drilled before heat treating the blade and will correspond with the wire.

Here we find ourselves at the drillpress ready to drill out our center punched pinholes. This particular knife is gonna have 2 different size pins that go through the handle material 1/8" & 1/16". You'll notice how I marked the smaller holes with a sharpie to prevent drilling one of the small holes with the larger bit. This wouldn't be the end of the world but could cause allignment issues down the road or throw off the wire pattern.

This is where we're leaving off for today. Stay tuned right here in The cutting Edge for more to come !

I do appologize for the pic quality in some of the shop pics. Lighting could be much better because I use a one of those tall household lamps with 3 bulbs that I move from station to station.

Also, PLEASE feel free to comment, critique, and ask any questions you may have reguarding the knife, process, tools, materials or anything else that's of interest to you.

Thanks alot for following along and participating in the creation of "The Belduque" -Josh

I sent you an email, but just wanted to put it public how special it is to watch my particular Phoenix rise from the flames!

Thank you so much!

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My moniker is my great grandfather's name. He served with the 2nd Florida Mounted Regiment in the Civil War. Afterward, he came home, packed his wife into a wagon, and was one of the first NorteAmericanos on the Frio River southwest of San Antonio ..... Kinda where present day Dilley is ...

"Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway." John WayneNCOWS #3403

Yes I am excited! In fact, I am going to make a whole new pic for my profile once my Josh Dabney Belduque and Botas (Mexican/Spanish/Californio leggings worn instead of chaps) from Chuck Burrows arrives!

My moniker is my great grandfather's name. He served with the 2nd Florida Mounted Regiment in the Civil War. Afterward, he came home, packed his wife into a wagon, and was one of the first NorteAmericanos on the Frio River southwest of San Antonio ..... Kinda where present day Dilley is ...

"Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway." John WayneNCOWS #3403

The place where I like to do my pictures is in a building that was originally Sam Brannon's in Old Sacramento. The bar was saved from destruction and a fireplace ... it is over 150 years old and comes from Leadville CO (i.e., home of the 'Unsinkable Molly Brown).

My moniker is my great grandfather's name. He served with the 2nd Florida Mounted Regiment in the Civil War. Afterward, he came home, packed his wife into a wagon, and was one of the first NorteAmericanos on the Frio River southwest of San Antonio ..... Kinda where present day Dilley is ...

"Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway." John WayneNCOWS #3403

My moniker is my great grandfather's name. He served with the 2nd Florida Mounted Regiment in the Civil War. Afterward, he came home, packed his wife into a wagon, and was one of the first NorteAmericanos on the Frio River southwest of San Antonio ..... Kinda where present day Dilley is ...

"Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway." John WayneNCOWS #3403

My moniker is my great grandfather's name. He served with the 2nd Florida Mounted Regiment in the Civil War. Afterward, he came home, packed his wife into a wagon, and was one of the first NorteAmericanos on the Frio River southwest of San Antonio ..... Kinda where present day Dilley is ...

"Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway." John WayneNCOWS #3403

Old Sacramento is where I will be doing tours as a docent, so I will keep an eye out for Duchess ... and if I run into her, I will try to get a pic ...

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My moniker is my great grandfather's name. He served with the 2nd Florida Mounted Regiment in the Civil War. Afterward, he came home, packed his wife into a wagon, and was one of the first NorteAmericanos on the Frio River southwest of San Antonio ..... Kinda where present day Dilley is ...

"Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway." John WayneNCOWS #3403

BTW, if my memoriy serves me (always doubtful at best), you actually have a ANTIGUE version ...

Could you reprint the pic here to show how close Josh is to the real thing?

Thanks!

(And I think we both were very lucky in what we have found!)

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My moniker is my great grandfather's name. He served with the 2nd Florida Mounted Regiment in the Civil War. Afterward, he came home, packed his wife into a wagon, and was one of the first NorteAmericanos on the Frio River southwest of San Antonio ..... Kinda where present day Dilley is ...

"Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway." John WayneNCOWS #3403

Wanted to come back when i had more time to read all the instruction,very interesting Josh,free hand on that enlay design?Wow! I can see by you tutering where the drillin holes part could be a tad tricky.I take it you do the enlay design first then shape the handle material? This is great to see..

Josh, that is going to look fantastic. If you keep this up I might actually be able to call myself a Knife Butcher one of these days. I have certainly learned alot for your post. Thanks for taking the time to do this for all of us.

Wadd, yer a lucky man. can't wait to see you in all your finery.

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Lost..... I ain't never been lost...... fearsome confused fer a month er two once... but I never been lost.Life is a Journey, the best that we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

GCR- Yup, Freehand all the way. Also do all my grinding after profiling freehand. Sometimes profile freehand too, LOL. Depending on the shape of the blade'n such.

As fer the wire, The handle will be attatched and ground about 97 % to shape before putting the wire in. It's a little hard to descibe but the wire has to "roll" around the contours of the handle 3-dimentionally. The wire has to stay 90 degrees to the surface of the wood so as the wire is making a scroll shape it will also be rolling "twisting" the the left or right and diving or rising as the pattern follows the contour of the handle.

It'll be much more understandable when we get to pics of that part, LOL.

Stay tuned for another update tomorrow that will take us through grinding in the bevels of the blade.

Today we'll be taking a gander at and discussing the grinding of a full height flat grind and a convex edge.

The first step in the process is covering the "edge" of our blade blank with Dykem layout fluid. The purpose of this is to give us a high contrast backround to layout the edge of the blade. The Dykem seems to hold up to the heat produced while grinding and repeated dunking in water and wiping clean much better than a permanent marker which is often used for this purpose.

Once the layout fluid is dry we use our digital calipers to measure the thickness of the blank then divide by two and scribe where the actual edge of the blade will end up in the center of the blade

Now I put one bolster on with both pins in place and make a pencil mark on the leading edge of the bolster. In keeping with the Belduque style blade I want my plunge line to run right up the bolster face almost giving the appearance of no plunge at all when the blade is completed. Now I clamped my file guide onto the blade lined up with my pencil mark to insure that I don't grind too far towards the rear of the knife. That mistake is very easy to do and if it happens the only solution is to make the bolsters skinnier.

Now we're ready to begin grinding the actual bevels of the blade. Here's a shot of the lead in grind. There are several benefits to the lead in. The main benifit is that putting your blade against the belt with a 90 degree corner on the blade edge will shear the grains right off the belt seriously reducing the usable life of the belt. I grind my lead in at around 30 or so degrees because it gives just a little wider "flat" to go back to on the next pass. The other benefit of the lead in grind is that your thinning the edge of the blade down to .040 or there abouts which reduces the risk of getting the edge off center later in the grinding process.

In the next shot you'll see how we "walk" our grinds up the blade towards the spine. It's VERY important to keep thing as EVEN as possible from the left to right side while grinding. This means we grind up an 1/8 or so on one side then flip and even things up. In one word here's why we do this- WARP.

Say for example you were to grind the left bevel all the way to the spine before touching the right side. What will happen is this- As your grinding and heating up the left side of the blade the steel will warp towards the heat. So when your done with that side you'll have a good flat bevel on the left but because of the warp you won't be able to get the right side flat and you'll end up with an edge that will seriously hook off to the right because of the warp that happens while grinding the second side. this is another thing thats kinda difficult to put into words but the bottom line is to grind as evenly as possible

All the grinding thus far has been done with a 40 grit belt. So far we've seen the "Hogging" stage of the grinding. What happens with a rough belt is that you'll have a uniform looking surface but in fact there will be very deep errant scratches under the surface that will reveal themselves as you begin to refine the surface. You'll notice the waves and ridges in the grind at this point. While hogging we're only giving a half hearted effort at a smooth grind. We'll really begin to fix up our grinds after switching to an 80 grit. We'll also use this belt to push our bevels right up to the brink of the spine. We do NOT want to grind into the spine !!

From here we'll now go to a 220 grit. At 220 we don't want to be doing a bunch of grinding. At this point we are refinding the surface and making very minor adjustments to our grind lines. I'm also adding a "convex" edge at this point down to around .020 which is about as thin as I'll go before heat treating the blade.

At this stage we're gonna give this blade a light etch and have a look at what the damascus pattern looks like now that we're getting close to final dimentions on the bevels.

Now for a flat grind we could go to a 400 grit belt and refine the blade further at this point but comming off the belt grinder can be very decieving as to the actual quality of the flat. So we are going to go to the JUDGE ! The un-flinching, un-wavering, brutally honest and cruel measurer of the flat grind.... The disk sander. I started out with some 320 grit paper on the disk and refined the bevels to see what I've "actually" got, not what it "looks like" I've got. Lo and behold, A low spot on the spine quicly reveals itself.

With this unfortunate but almost inevitable discovery we go right back to 120 grit on the disk to get a TRUE flat. And we finish up with another quick etch to see the pattern again.

Thats where we're leaving off for today folks. Don't be shy now Pards. Please ask any question you have, Josh

You make it look so easy and matter of fact ... I can see so many places where I would have made permanent and ugly mistakes ...

But this knife is a work of art!

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My moniker is my great grandfather's name. He served with the 2nd Florida Mounted Regiment in the Civil War. Afterward, he came home, packed his wife into a wagon, and was one of the first NorteAmericanos on the Frio River southwest of San Antonio ..... Kinda where present day Dilley is ...

"Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway." John WayneNCOWS #3403

Josh, not wishing to be crass, but that knife is exactly the same shape as my 'Prestige' make carving knife, part of a knife set we got as a wedding present in '67.What makes it a 'Belduque' ? And what does the name mean?

AE

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Trouble is...when I'm paid to do a job, I always carry it through. (Angel Eyes, The Good, The Bad & The Ugly)BWSS # 54, RATS# 445, SCORRS,Cowboy from Robin Hood's back yard!!

Well, some people would say that crass is my middle name ... I prefer outspoken ...

The Belduque was the hispanic equivalent of a Bowie, and used much the same way. Like a Bowie, the 'back of the edged side was also sharpened about a half to a third of the way ... which made in easier for stabbing or skinning an animal.

They are said to be related to Spanish kitchen knives ( In fact, the South American equivalent was called a Cuchillo Criolo). The Spanish knives are in turn thought to be taken from the Flemish kitchen knives ... and named after a certain beautiful duchess of the lowlands ... hence Belle Duque to Belduque ( but that is just a wive's tale; I don't think that there is any documentation ... but what a great story!)

Hope this helps .... but I think the main thing that separates a Belduque and Cuchillo from kitchen knifes is the sharpened opposite side of the blade ...

By the way, Vaqueros tended to wear them as a form of 'boot knife', with the handle sticking out of their Botas (i.e. leggings). If you blow up the bear hunting seen below, the rider in the foreground has one tucked into his right Botas with only the handle showing ... but it looks like a real handy place to wear it when on horseback.

My moniker is my great grandfather's name. He served with the 2nd Florida Mounted Regiment in the Civil War. Afterward, he came home, packed his wife into a wagon, and was one of the first NorteAmericanos on the Frio River southwest of San Antonio ..... Kinda where present day Dilley is ...

"Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway." John WayneNCOWS #3403

From the research I did, which is probably all the links WWE posted, it seems that the term Belduque was a term similar in our speak to Bowie. Meaning that it pretty much means Big Ole' Knife, LOL.

These knives were carried by drifting free spirited type of folks who lived by their own rules and carried the knives as an all purpose blade and examples from plain to highly ornate were found. Too many of these folks their knife was their most prized possesion so perhaps even a poor drifter may have owned a more ornate example.

This is my interpretation based on the pics I've seen of historical Belduques, but not a copy of any specific example.

All the blades seem to be this basic shape with a multitude of different handle styles and it would seem to make sense that they were a derivitive of kitchen style knives.

From my research on Californios and other hispanic riders, it seems that two things are so pandemic that most writers just mention them as fact ...

*That the average mounted Vaquero felt that any activity that could not be done on horseback was somehow below their dignity ... and that it was a matter or pride to complete any action on horseback.

*Well into the age of gunpowder and percussion arms, the favorite weapon of the mounted Vaquero was the knife and short sword. It was felt that shooting someone accross the distance of a barroom did not take as much courage as a bladed conflict at very short range ... I'm just sayin'

I am including another of James Walkers idyllic paintings below ... on the rider on the right, notice the saber mounted in its saddle sheath much the way that Wichesters would be carried. On the left rider, notice the Belduque handle rising out of his left Bota ....

My moniker is my great grandfather's name. He served with the 2nd Florida Mounted Regiment in the Civil War. Afterward, he came home, packed his wife into a wagon, and was one of the first NorteAmericanos on the Frio River southwest of San Antonio ..... Kinda where present day Dilley is ...

"Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway." John WayneNCOWS #3403